There seems to be a lot of botting going on

[Tubit101]

Some time ago I was watching youtube when I got a video ad specifically aimed at offering me "boosting" in WoWs. It was very professionally made with a voice over offering their services in perfect English. It was clearly a high production value advertisement.

 

I was surprised. Somebody clearly had a sizable marketing budget aimed at offering "power leveling" or "boosting", whichever you decide to call it. It's just fancy words for "botting". Then I got curious, so I did a quick google and found no less than seven different "boosting" sites on the first page of my search results. Apparently, botting in WoWs is big business.

 

It started to dawn on me that not every terrible player you see out there are wearing their pants as a hat. Not all of them are "glue-eaters" as some streamer likes to call them. Those guys on your team that die needlessly within the first 5 minutes of the match are likely to be bots. Those guys that never talk or care about team play could very likely indeed be bots.

 

The thing is that these botting services require that you use a premium account. So, Wargaming gets their money from this - which is smart, because that makes them less likely to care and deal with the problem. I guess the "logic" behind WGs apathy is that they shouldn't spend money on fighting something that earns them money.

 

With this many different services offering botting for money, it's clear that botting is rampant on this game - and that's not counting the possible numbers of privately run bots. Frankly, it has been terrible playing lately. The quality of matches seems to have dropped into the toilet. I have noticed streamers mentioning this too.

 

Thoughts? Ideas? I'm looking forward to hearing them, as well as the inevitable influx of "this is fine, you are wrong, WG never makes mistakes" posts.

[Rafax_3]

*edited*

[Excavatus]

That advertisement has nothing to do with bots. If you are talking about stat boosting.

They have more than a dozen of teams doing that years for WOT.

and there are more than hundreds of teams doing that years for WOT just to steal your acc.

 

It is basically you give the control of your acc to the said team,

pay them some money, buy a premium vehicle (ship)

 

and they grind you a line,

they grind you free xp,

they grind you credits..

even If you want, they grind you stats..

 

for a given time..

 

for example,

you want the musashi and no time and energy for grinding.

you pay them.. for example 50 euros, give the control of your acc for about a week.

they play it 24/7, they play it good, they use premium ships.. and grind your 750K free xp in a week..

 

[LilJumpa]

It is not botting. Those "services" have good players behind it playing the accounts.  

So you have cases of account sharing. And even if this would be against rules (it is not) only the account that willingly shares his information would be punishable.

 

One could make a case and construct a match rigging violation but then again only the account that uses these sevice would be punishable.

[Tubit101]

So what you are saying is that there is a horde of very good players out there who are grinding every single paying customer's account manually? Sounds unlikely to me, especially at the prices they are offering. Their earnings would have to be abysmal.

[philjd]

Actually, no, what they are saying is that there are good players out there who will, for a fee, play your account for you to achieve whatever objective you want to get, be it purple stats, Musashi or something else. It's a way for them to make some money from something they are, presumably, good at playing.

Abysmal earnings - depends, earning something while playing is better than earning nothing, and if they are really good, then it might not even take too much of their time to achieve whatever the objective is.

[Tubit101]

10 minutes ago, philjd said:

Actually, no, what they are saying is that there are good players out there who will, for a fee, play your account for you to achieve whatever objective you want to get, be it purple stats, Musashi or something else. It's a way for them to make some money from something they are, presumably, good at playing.

Abysmal earnings - depends, earning something while playing is better than earning nothing, and if they are really good, then it might not even take too much of their time to achieve whatever the objective is.

I find this theory somewhat weaker compared to the obvious advantages a "boosting service" would gain using bots. The monetary gains of an automated system would be too huge to disregard. These are not some bored individual players who need something to do and a bit of change - they are professional organizations.

[LilJumpa]

2 minutes ago, Tubit101 said:

I find this theory somewhat weaker compared to the obvious advantages a "boosting service" would gain using bots. The monetary gains of an automated system would be too huge to disregard. These are not some bored individual players who need something to do and a bit of change - they are professional organizations.

 

Boosting your stats with a bot will surely work. If you are able to program, script and run a bot that ranks out and has 60% Winrate in randoms then you probably would be making (guranteed) money somewhere else.

[Tubit101]

But as long as you don't order the winrate boost, botting would work. Just a theory. I find it very interesting that these "boosting" services are so prevalent. I guess that means we can't really trust the stats of anyone.

[Caughtintherain]

I think a lot of you are misunderstanding the OP. He's suggesting that there are programs that run while you're AFK that basically select a ship, click battle and press W. Every so often they look in the direction of the enemy and click.

 

It's not about stats, it's about XP. It will tank your winrate and average damage but you'll get a few hundred XP per match, so when you come back the next day you'll have tens of thousands more XP so you can get to the next ship in the tree. It's not beyond the realms of plausibility, in fact I've seen a guy recently playing a CV and BB that doesn't respond to F commands, chat or talk. He just sends his planes to A10 for 10 minutes before they go after the nearest ship, or he sails across the B or I file pinging any ship in range in a BB. It's the same every game.

 

As for super unicum players boosting your stats or getting you a premium for money, yeah it probably happens but is not the point of this post.

[LilJumpa]

5 minutes ago, Caughtintherain said:

I think a lot of you are misunderstanding the OP. He's suggesting that there are programs that run while you're AFK that basically select a ship, click battle and press W. Every so often they look in the direction of the enemy and click.

 

It's not about stats, it's about XP. It will tank your winrate and average damage but you'll get a few hundred XP per match, so when you come back the next day you'll have tens of thousands more XP so you can get to the next ship in the tree. It's not beyond the realms of plausibility, in fact I've seen a guy recently playing a CV and BB that doesn't respond to F commands, chat or talk. He just sends his planes to A10 for 10 minutes before they go after the nearest ship, or he sails across the B or I file pinging any ship in range in a BB. It's the same every game.

 

As for super unicum players boosting your stats or getting you a premium for money, yeah it probably happens but is not the point of this post.

 

Then it seems I am the only one that actually looked at the googled results. (read clicked on them to see what those offer)

 

Sorry about that.

I'm going to take that useless information out of the thread now and leave it to the guys with the already made up opinion (see title) and let you guys further speculate about bots.

[Caughtintherain]

27 minutes ago, LilJumpa said:

 

Then it seems I am the only one that actually looked at the googled results. (read clicked on them to see what those offer)

 

Sorry about that.

I'm going to take that useless information out of the thread now and leave it to the guys with the already made up opinion (see title) and let you guys further speculate about bots.

 

Hey, thanks for putting some effort in and doing some research! Next time you do something like that you should include the line "hey guys I've looked in to this by <going to those websites and looking what they actually offer> and your premise is incorrect". Your posts, as posted seemed to indicate idle speculation on your part, I think you'll agree that it's more important to get your point across cleanly and precisely than to have the smug satisfaction of the dramatic reveal after someone disagrees with you.

 

Spurred on by your passion I've just googled "wows bots" myself and the results were thin to say the least. Mostly forum posts speculating about bots and sites offering aimbots, which is not what the OP is talking about. I realise you can't post links to prove your claim, and I don't doubt that you found websites offering what you said, but I think it's possible that the services you claim exist exist, while the services OP claims exist exist. You may have had an easier time finding your services and stopped there, but I'm sure you're aware the OP can't post links to the sites he's claiming exist.

 

Maybe you're both really clever people who are both right who have both done the research! If the research was all that mattered then I guess I'd call you both wrong and say "no the only things on the internet for WoWS are aimbots". But I won't because I'd be wrong.

 

Also as for the existence of bots that play the game, see co-op. It wouldn't be hard for a former or current WG employee to get his or her hands on the bot code and sell it, or for them or someone else to make a crude facsimile that did the stuff I mentioned in my earlier post.

 

Huh, re-reading this post I went from accepting that you were correct to begin with to realising that you might be simultaneously correct with someone else later on. I won't change it because I quite like the thought process.

[Tubit101]

4 minutes ago, Caughtintherain said:

 

Also as for the existence of bots that play the game, see co-op. It wouldn't be hard for a former WG employee to get his or her hands on the bot code and sell it, or to make a crude facsimile that did the stuff I mentioned in my earlier post.

 

Hm, that is thought provoking... Especially considering the fact that the limits on modding in this game seem to be extremely liberal. There seems to be no end to the situational data a mod can pull out from this game, which would be ideal for making a well functioning bot.

[NothingButTheRain]

I have noticed something odd a couple days ago I think. Maybe a week but it was very recently.

 

There were 2 Independences, 1 on each team. One was obviously AFK and I happened to play my Richelieu in the team of the CV that was not afk.

Well the afk guy got reported, my team won, on to the next battle.

 

What happened is this: Both teams again had an Independence, again I was teamed with the same guy who was not afk and the other team's Independence was afk again. Both the exact same players.

 

But when I asked our own CV if he was in another battle on the same map with the same afk Independence on the other team, our Independence insisted he was not the same player as last battle and that he didn't even play his Independence before that same day.

 

And that cought my attention that he was in fact rigging victories. This guy had purple win rate for CV, obvious how he got them.

[Miessa3]

32 minutes ago, Tubit101 said:

 

Hm, that is thought provoking... Especially considering the fact that the limits on modding in this game seem to be extremely liberal. There seems to be no end to the situational data a mod can pull out from this game, which would be ideal for making a well functioning bot.

the problem here is, the bots WG is using in coop are played by the server including all information the servers has. (coop cv always know exactly where you are for example even if unspotted for the entire game).

I doubt that can be reproduced with a client even if you had the code.

[MrConway]

1 hour ago, Tubit101 said:

So what you are saying is that there is a horde of very good players out there who are grinding every single paying customer's account manually? Sounds unlikely to me, especially at the prices they are offering. Their earnings would have to be abysmal.

 

The earning for this kind of service is usually bad and done from countries with weaker economies. Please do feel free to PM me links to any such YouTube ads or websites that you come across.

[LilJumpa]

3 minutes ago, MrConway said:

 

The earning for this kind of service is usually bad and done from countries with weaker economies. Please do feel free to PM me links to any such YouTube ads or websites that you come across.

Not that hard to google tbh.

 

The first 6 hits are "services"

[MrConway]

1 hour ago, LilJumpa said:

Not that hard to google tbh.

 

The first 6 hits are "services"

 

We are also already aware of most of them, but I like to double check ;)

[Ze_Reckless]

One could also think about how much fun a game must be when some people choose to pay people for playing their game for them ...

 

Seriously, maybe tone down the grind a bit? I understand there must be incentives for the players to spend money, but I don't believe you guys are in danger of starving to death. Just look at other games where people spend a lot of money for purely cosmetic items. That works if your game is good. Do you lack that confidence?

[13Ninjas]

3 hours ago, MrConway said:

The earning for this kind of service is usually bad and done from countries with weaker economies. Please do feel free to PM me links to any such YouTube ads or websites that you come across.

Curious why WG are not investigating these links themselves, and even if links were sent to you, what can you do? WG will not have any power over private websites, and the hosting companies  & ISP's will do nothing.

 

What you really need is the account holders, find them and ban their account & IP.

[Miessa3]

22 minutes ago, Ze_Reckless said:

One could also think about how much fun a game must be when some people choose to pay people for playing their game for them ...

 

Seriously, maybe tone down the grind a bit? I understand there must be incentives for the players to spend money, but I don't believe you guys are in danger of starving to death. Just look at other games where people spend a lot of money for purely cosmetic items. That works if your game is good. Do you lack that confidence?

The grind is there to get a progression going. To be fair there will always be people that feel they need to have everything now and asap and those are the reason these things exist as well as games where you can unlock everything by paying money which makes the game kind of pointless and to a occasional thing or something for one or two evenings.

The same would happen to WoWS to some extend as this is what happens when there is no progression anymore. And thats not something we (and for sure also not WG) wants right?

[Tungstonid]

6 hours ago, Tubit101 said:

Some time ago I was watching youtube when I got a video ad specifically aimed at offering me "boosting" in WoWs. It was very professionally made with a voice over offering their services in perfect English. It was clearly a high production value advertisement.

 

I was surprised. Somebody clearly had a sizable marketing budget aimed at offering "power leveling" or "boosting", whichever you decide to call it. It's just fancy words for "botting". Then I got curious, so I did a quick google and found no less than seven different "boosting" sites on the first page of my search results. Apparently, botting in WoWs is big business.

 

It started to dawn on me that not every terrible player you see out there are wearing their pants as a hat. Not all of them are "glue-eaters" as some streamer likes to call them. Those guys on your team that die needlessly within the first 5 minutes of the match are likely to be bots. Those guys that never talk or care about team play could very likely indeed be bots.

 

The thing is that these botting services require that you use a premium account. So, Wargaming gets their money from this - which is smart, because that makes them less likely to care and deal with the problem. I guess the "logic" behind WGs apathy is that they shouldn't spend money on fighting something that earns them money.

 

With this many different services offering botting for money, it's clear that botting is rampant on this game - and that's not counting the possible numbers of privately run bots. Frankly, it has been terrible playing lately. The quality of matches seems to have dropped into the toilet. I have noticed streamers mentioning this too.

 

Thoughts? Ideas? I'm looking forward to hearing them, as well as the inevitable influx of "this is fine, you are wrong, WG never makes mistakes" posts.

 

Just like with the "everyone is a cheater 'xept me because there are a lot of websites with illegal mods out there" guy we didn't have that long ago, as long as you don't have any numbers (preferably an official/true number of bot users or at least the number of people actually using those websites/services) to back up your claim, your thread is doing nothing more than spreading rumors. Quite frankly, you make it sound like 50% of the playerbase consists of bot accounts.

Just because there are a lot of websites out there, doesn't mean a lot of players are/use bots (or level services). Nor does it mean the bot business - or however you want to call it - is flourishing.

 

That said, streamers and players notice a declining trend in overall player performance since what feels like end of CBT with the steam release worsening that process. So nothing new here and certainly nothing which developed "lately".

 

[Tubit101]

6 minutes ago, Tungstonid said:

 

Just like with the "everyone is a cheater 'xept me because there are a lot of websites with illegal mods out there" guy we didn't have that long ago, as long as you don't have any numbers (preferably an official/true number of bot users or at least the number of people actually using those websites/services) to back up your claim, your thread is doing nothing more than spreading rumors. Quite frankly, you make it sound like 50% of the playerbase consists of bot accounts.

Just because there are a lot of websites out there, doesn't mean a lot of players are/use bots (or level services). Nor does it mean the bot business - or however you want to call it - is flourishing.

 

That said, streamers and players notice a declining trend in overall player performance since what feels like end of CBT with the steam release worsening that process. So nothing new here and certainly nothing which developed "lately".

 

I don't know... If there are at least 7 different "boosting" services out there, that indicates something, right? If there were one or two, they could very well be struggling. But with this many, I don't think that's the case.

 

I have no idea how many people buy these services, so 50% would be speculation on your part. What I do know is that there has been a decline in the quality of matches. I've taken a break from WoWs that I think lasted over half a year, so the game experience was rather abrupt when I returned. In particular the last few days, I might add, but that might just be coincidence. Anyways, on the whole it seems clear that there's been a regression in skill, communication and the willingness to play objectives. I personally attribute that to possible botting, because I don't see that many other options. When half the team pretty much commits suicide one or two minutes after the first enemy has been spotted, you start to wonder why. I also notice that this has been especially prevalent during daytime, which would be the time period that it would be natural to assume that bots would be more noticeable.

[Tungstonid]

8 minutes ago, Tubit101 said:

I don't know... If there are at least 7 different "boosting" services out there, that indicates something, right? If there were one or two, they could very well be struggling. But with this many, I don't think that's the case.

It might or might not indicate something. And as I said, as long as you (or someone else) can't contribute actual numbers there is no telling what exactely they indicate.

 

8 minutes ago, Tubit101 said:

I have no idea how many people buy these services, so 50% would be speculation on your part.

It was not a speculation on my part on how many bots are used in WoWS. I simply stated what your initial post sounds like because of the language you used, especially the highlighted parts.

 

8 minutes ago, Tubit101 said:

What I do know is that there has been a decline in the quality of matches. I've taken a break from WoWs that I think lasted over half a year, so the game experience was rather abrupt when I returned. In particular the last few days, I might add, but that might just be coincidence. Anyways, on the whole it seems clear that there's been a regression in skill, communication and the willingness to play objectives.

Which, as I said, is something people experience since end of CBT.

 

8 minutes ago, Tubit101 said:

I personally attribute that to possible botting, because I don't see that many other options. When half the team pretty much commits suicide one or two minutes after the first enemy has been spotted, you start to wonder why. I also notice that this has been especially prevalent during daytime, which would be the time period that it would be natural to assume that bots would be more noticeable.

More reasons for a decline in playerskill from the top of my head (some of which were also mentioned by other players in other threads):

- experienced/cooperative players leaving because their interests changed

- experienced/cooperative players leaving because WoWS changed "for the worse"

- Steam release attracting more casual players, i.e. more "I just want to see explosions/nice landscapes/ships" kind of players

- "I just want to see explosions/nice landscapes/ships" kind of players in general who not only joined during steam release

- end of CBT, i.e. some of the campers and know-it-alls from WoT joined WoWS

- no tutorials for new players and not so easy to find information about game mechanics

- higher complexity of the game so casual players can't/don't want to invest time to learn

- players have no need to improve (unless they want to stroke their e-peen), i.e. there are no skill barriers of any kind to unlock certain aspects of the game if you have enough time or money or both

 

No offence, but it seems like you haven't thought at all about other possible reasons.

[Tubit101]

4 minutes ago, Tungstonid said:

It might or might not indicate something. And as I said, as long as you (or someone else) can't contribute actual numbers there is no telling what exactely they indicate.

We'll just have to agree to disagree. I think it indicates that there is an existing market for these kinds of services and that it's enough to support several enterprises. Asking for actual numbers is an about as realistic demand as asking WG about how much they earn, in the respect that it's highly unlikely to get an actual answer, as you probably already well know.